The journey to becoming the greatest team in college basketball’s modern era began with an offseason exhibition tour of Italy in the summer of 1995 and did not end until the Kentucky Wildcats had capably solved the Syracuse zone defense across the river from Broadway in April 1996. They arrived, though, on a less conspicuous occasion midway through the season, when a locker room loaded with NBA-bound players acknowledged what is required of a champion.
“We had a team meeting, and Antoine Walker got up and said, ‘Hey, we all know I like to score the most on the team. But I’m willing to do whatever it takes to win a championship,’ ” Rick Pitino told The Sporting News. “Our practices were a bloodbath. Our second unit probably was every bit as good as our first unit. But when he got up at that meeting, it was a selfless act that really made the team become just about invincible. From that point on, it was the same practice, but everybody was totally focused.”
It is obvious now what an extraordinary team that 1995-96 Kentucky squad was. Nine of the team’s top 11 players reached the NBA, appearing in an average of 473 games each. Six of them were 1,000-point career scorers in college. Ten players averaged at least 9 minutes that season, and no one got more than 27. That was partly to keep every team member as freshly devastating as possible, and also because there were so many blowouts it was logical to get the reserves more run.
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They won UK's sixth NCAA Championship, and Pitino’s first. Their 34-2 record included a 27-game winning streak and a perfect 16-0 mark in the Southeastern Conference regular season.
The Wildcats ranked first in the nation in scoring and 11th in scoring defense, with an average margin of 22 points per game. They scored inside (30th in 2-point percentage) and outside (12th in 3-point percentage) and were at the top of the charts in assists. On the defensive end, they were second in steals and 30th in blocked shots.
They took down future pros Tariq Abdul-Wahad, Andre Miller, Keith Van Horn, Marcus Camby and John Wallace on their rampage through the NCAA Tournament. Oh, did I forget one? That’s right. They wiped out the great Tim Duncan, as well.
If college basketball were as simple as gathering the most talent and then issuing team jerseys, NCAA Tournament history would be much different. Becoming a championship team is a process beyond merely transacting a series of regular-season, conference tournament and March Madness games.
“There were a lot of egos in that room,” reserve guard Cameron Mills told SN. “There was just too much talent, and somehow Coach got us loving each other more than loving our playing time. That was a long journey for Antoine, because that was his sophomore year, and I think he might have been thinking about going to the NBA after the year. Antoine was always kind of a thorn in Coach’s side … He just was hard to coach. But during the year, the way he approached the game and approached the team changed.”
Obviously Walker was not the only special player on that 1995-96 Kentucky roster: freshman wing Ron Mercer would become the third overall pick in the 1997 NBA Draft; wing Derek Anderson produced seven double-figure scoring seasons in the league; guard Tony Delk was a consensus first-team All-American; center Nazr Mohammed, who played 88 minutes all season, would go on to play 18 seasons in the NBA.
Walker had been one of the foremost recruits of the Rick Pitino era, though, ranked among the top five prospects in the class of 1994, and he arrived with a reputation for, shall we say, self-interest. One of the most prominent prep scouts of the era said as much to me during a dinner during the 1993 Nike All-American Camp, in a much less flattering way.
Kentucky needed all of its many great players to acknowledge their numbers might never be what any of them could achieve in a less crowded rotation. When Walker assured all of them he was fully invested, the Wildcats began to perform like “the Untouchables”.
“They just were an amazing group,” Pitino said. “I tell people all the time, they ask, ‘Why do you stay in coaching?’ And I’ve told them for the last 15 years: I want to coach another ’96 team. It hasn’t happened yet.”
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In 1995, Day One of college basketball practice was much more of a true beginning than it is now, when players and coaches can work together about as often as they wish. (And, sometimes, more so.)
The Kentucky Wildcats had been lifting and running and hooping together, and they’d gone on that playing tour of Italy that included a trip to Venice and a chance to meet Pope John Paul II, but the start of practice that followed Big Blue Madness was a chance for all the UK players and coaches to gather and commence their journey toward that season’s goal.
With all of that talent, though, what was the attitude toward winning the NCAA Championship? They could? They should? They must? They better … or else?
“There’s always only one option at Kentucky,” Mark Pope, then a power forward and now the Wildcats head coach, told SN. “With the roster we had, the kind of slow build the year before where we got upset to go to the Final Four after being No. 1 in the country most of the year – we all very much felt like there was only one outcome that could even come close to acceptable.
“As great as Coach P was, I think there was even pressure on him. He’d been at Kentucky six years, seven years, and hadn’t won it yet.”
1996 Untouchables
Won-loss 34-2
PPG 91.4
Opp PPG 69.4
20-plus point wins 20
NBA players 9
Pitino had rescued Kentucky from the depths of NCAA scandal and taken the program to the Elite Eight and the Greatest Game Ever Played in 1992, the one-point loss to Duke, in just his third season. They won 30 games and advanced to the Final Four the following season. But the next two seasons ended with a second-round March Madness upset loss to Marquette, and then with a dismal performance in the 1995 Elite Eight against North Carolina. UK scored 61 points and shot 28 percent from the field.
“If it wasn’t the most painful, I’d have to really do some research to find a more painful loss in my lifetime,” Pope told SN. “I think we were in Birmingham and we played maybe a 5 o’clock game, and the way I remember it was we went in the locker room afterward just devastated. I mean, we had been rolling.
“After the game, if I remember, Coach … we sat down in our uniforms and watched the entire game. And Coach just crushing us in the locker room. And you know how sometimes remembering makes it even worse? For some reason, I want to say we watched it a second time. I feel like we were in the locker room until – it seemed like it was 1 o’clock in the morning. I’m sure that wasn’t true. The next morning, he had us come down for one-on-ones … and just laid into us again. It was such a brutal loss.”
Pitino left that game and season certain about one key element of the subsequent season’s roster, a little less so about another. Wing Rodrick Rhodes, once the No. 1 recruit in the country, had struggled in that Carolina game and, with Ron Mercer arriving as a freshman and Derek Anderson becoming eligible following his transfer from Ohio State, seemed likely to find few minutes available to him. Pitino asked him to consider redshirting; he instead transferred to USC.
“Rod was a great guy, and I didn’t want to see him go out his senior year playing limited minutes,” Pitino said. “Rod wasn’t far behind, but he wasn’t going to play a lot. When he transferred, I was disappointed, but it was the right move for him.”
With the abundance of talent, and so many players who were NBA prospects, Pitino presented to the players a reminder that Ed O’Bannon, George Zidek and Tyus Edney all had been drafted from UCLA’s 1995 squad and their NCAA title was an ingredient in their selections. And, of course, if they sacrificed minutes and points to win in April 1996, there would be similar rewards in June.
What the coaches didn’t quite have figured out, and wouldn’t for a while, was how to handle the most important position on the floor. No one in the starting lineup for the 1995 squad averaged even 4 assists per game. Delk had ideal size for a point guard – 6-1, 190 pounds – but always had been more comfortable as a scorer.
“We started to experiment in the summertime, right before we took our European trip,” Delk said. “I played point guard in all those games, and we played against some really good teams. It gave me a chance to do something I hadn’t done … it’s a tough position to play when you haven’t done it for so many years. It was something I could do maybe in possessions, but if you say whole game, focus on it, that wasn’t going to be my strong point at the time.”
Jeff Sheppard had some experience running the offense, but he also was better playing off the ball. Wayne Turner had been a coveted recruit but still was a freshman. Anthony Epps was there, started six games and averaged 4.2 assists in 20 minutes per game the year before, but was the right point guard for this collection of stallions a former walk-on who arrived thinking he’d be the guy fans chanted to enter at the end of blowouts?
Indeed, maybe such a player was ideal for the position, because his only concern would be facilitating the opportunities of others. Though he ranked fourth on the team in minutes, he was only sixth in shot attempts.
“Anthony knew how to set the table for all of us,” Delk said.
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It wasn’t until the fourth game of the season – after the Wildcats had lost to Marcus Camby, John Calipari and Massachusetts in the Detroit suburbs, after Epps came off the bench to play 32 minutes and deliver 9 points, 6 assists and 5 rebounds in an 89-82 win over Bob Knight and Indiana – that Epps entered the lineup.
“At the beginning of the year, I think I was like the 12th man,” Epps told SN. “The coaching staff was always positive, would keep working with me, and once I finally got my shot, I figured out what I had to do to stay on the court. And that was to be an extension of Coach Pitino, because he was a former point guard, as well. I studied real hard; I knew every play and where everybody needed to be on the play.
“You’re playing with nine NBA players. Somebody has got to be able to control what is going on. I kind of grew into that role.”
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The impact of installing Epps was immediate. Within a week, a Georgia Tech team led by Stephon Marbury, which would become a No. 3 NCAA seed, fell by 23. Soon after, Louisville and DeJuan Wheat, who would become a No. 6 seed, also became a 23-point victim. The first four SEC opponents fell by 23.5 points.
And then came Baton Rouge.
“Nobody on this team was resting on their laurels. There was not a single guy, ever, in any practice where I can remember somebody was dogging it because they had a bad day,” said Mills, who worked with Lexington sportscaster Dick Gabriel to produce a documentary "The Team", on this team's experience.
“Coach Pitino did a fantastic job of saying: ‘Nobody’s time is guaranteed. Nobody’s starting position is guaranteed. Everybody’s going to earn the minutes they get.
“What he said, you took seriously. I mean, there were ripped jerseys after every practice. These guys went at each other. It wasn’t that the guys disliked other, because we’re all hanging out in the lodge, watching movies and going bowling every night. But during practice, it was war. It was scary war. And you’re thinking, how’s Coach going to manage this? But somehow, he did.”
He managed by assuring this ferocity would be directed toward the opposition on game night. Entering the SEC road game at LSU on Tuesday, Jan. 16, no one had come within a dozen points of the Wildcats in 45 days.
“When I’m in the game in the first half on this team, something crazy has happened,” said Mills, a former walk-on who later would excel for the 1998 Kentucky champions. “We scored 86 in the first half. I’ve gone back and watched that game, especially the first half – I’ve never seen any team on any level dominate another team like this.
“It wasn’t just that we were talented. Sometimes, a player will get in ‘the zone’ and no matter what they do, the ball is going in. This was a whole team in the zone during that 20-minute half. We could not do anything wrong. The very last play of the half, Jeff Sheppard was running point and we were running some sort of action, and the clock’s ticking down and we’ve got 4 seconds, and he launches three from about 26 feet with a man in his face and just drains it. And it’s like, OK, that’s just ridiculous.
“Literally, at halftime, Coach had nothing to say. There was no correction, no yelling, there was no encouragement. He sat there and talked to his assistant coaches for 10 minutes and, ‘Alright, everybody up.’
“That was the game, like, ‘Oh, shoot, maybe we really are this good.’ ”
On Feb. 11, 1996, the Wildcats had reached the 120-point mark in three of the prior six games and, on that Sunday, introduced a “denim”-style uniform that now is looked upon as a popular piece of nostalgia, a part of the “Untouchables” brand. On that day, even after UK defeated NCAA-bound Arkansas by 15 points, well … let’s get the story from Tom Leach, now voice of the Wildcats and then co-hosting a postgame call-in show with Dick Gabriel on the UK radio network.
“That day, we did an hour of calls, and not a single one talked about the game. They were all actually complaining about the denim uniforms,” Leach told TSN. “Winning handily had become so commonplace nobody even brought up the game.”
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Antoine Walker
Getty Images
By the time the Wildcats got to the final of the 1996 SEC Tournament, which they’d won the previous four seasons, there had claimed 18 consecutive victories against members of the conference, 10 of those by more than 25 points, only one by fewer than a dozen.
The Wildcats’ all-out pressure defense, amplified by all that depth and the lengthy build of nearly every player, squeezed loose 22.6 turnovers per game. Opponents ranked 227th out of 305 teams in 2-point field goal attempts because none of them could near enough to the basket to shoot from there. The Cats were averaging 92.6 points. The game was starting to appear easy.
They’d already defeated Mississippi State, their opponent in the title game, by 18 points, and that one was played in Starkville. The Bulldogs had two future first-round picks, center Erick Dampier and wing Dontae’ Jones, but they combined for nearly as many turnovers (16) as points (24) in that first meeting.
“We were like invincible in the SEC playoffs; I think we were something like 19-1. I remember, not throwing the game, but hoping we would lose, just because we were blowing out everybody,” Pitino told TSN.
“I benched Antoine Walker in the second half. I took him out and said, ‘Just sit down.’ I don’t remember what he did wrong. He said, ‘What did I do?’ I said, ‘Just sit down.’ I was hoping they would come back and we would lose. I knew once we lost it, we weren’t going to get beat. So Antoine, probably to this day, doesn’t realize why he got taken out.”
It genuinely turned out to be true: The greatest challenge for Kentucky to conquer was Kentucky.
Pitino kept the press on full blast for the early NCAA Tournament games, against San Jose State, Virginia Tech and Utah. The opposition turned over the ball a combined 62 times, and Wildcats won those games by a combined 93 points.
The challenge in the Elite Eight at Minneapolis’ Metrodome was different. It was going to become different at some point. Pitino recognized more gifted teams have more gifted guards who not only won’t be as impacted by pressure defense, they might even punish it.
Even with starting point guard Tony Rutland down with an injury, Wake Forest had a future NBA guard in Rusty LaRue and capable sophomores Jerry Braswell and Steven Goolsby. They were not unaffected by Kentucky’s ferocious defense, but what really became the difference were the double-teams applied when the ball was entered to the low post, to Duncan, who experienced a misery he might not have thought possible.
"They attacked our strength. Tim was in a box, as soon as he caught the ball. It was a quick double-team and a physical double-team," said Ricky Stokes, then an assistant to Dave Odom at Wake, now senior associate commissioner of the Mid-American Conference. "How do you simulate two tall, athletic guys getting to where you want the ball to go at game speed? Just the physical presence, frustration."
Whether it was Pope or Walker or 6-10 Walter McCarty, the nearest big man who wasn’t assigned to Duncan was ordered to dash in his direction the moment a pass was released toward him. They all but literally made Duncan disappear. He attempted only 7 shots, made two. He committed five turnovers. Did I mention this was Tim Duncan? He was near the end of his junior year, and he spent nearly all of his interview time answering questions about whether he would enter the draft that year and perhaps rescue the miserable Timberwolves.
“We just couldn’t rely on pressure all the time to be the deciding factor in the game,” Pope said. “This was very much in our wheelhouse, because everything we did was ending up somehow bringing a second defender to the ball and rotating out of it: everything we did in the press, everything we did in the halfcourt. With that team we were able to come in just wave after wave after wave.”
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The NCAA Tournament was not seeded in the same way then as now. The Final Four matchups between the regional champions rotated from year to year. The No. 1 seeds were not ordered. So if the top two teams in the nation survived to that final weekend, they very well could find themselves playing each other in the national semifinals.
UMass against Kentucky became the final before the final.
After beating the Wildcats in that November game, Calipari’s Minutemen did not lose until their 27th game of the season, a late-February home meeting with George Washington. They defeated Allen Iverson and Georgetown in the Elite Eight, limiting AI to 6-of-21 shooting, and arrived in New York for the Final Four with a 35-1 record.
And yet what that ought to have conveyed in the arena at New Jersey’s Meadowlands never developed, because Kentucky was that good. Camby was, as well, and scored 25 points on 9-of-17 shooting despite the Wildcats’ efforts to make him as irrelevant as Duncan had been. But Pitino successfully conspired to draw UMass shooting guard Carmelo Travieso into foul trouble, and he missed time after picking up his fourth foul early in the second half.
The heart of those Minutemen kept them coming back even after falling into double-digit deficits multiple times, but Kentucky refused to lose, regardless, converting 12-of-14 from the foul line in the final 4 minutes, including a perfect 6-of-6 from Pope, who had not been an exceptional free throw shooter.
“They just had a solid five, and to beat them, you would have to get into their legs or get into their bench … but their guards were solid. And mentally tough,” Delk said. “I was the one guy who had experienced the Final Four, so it wasn’t satisfying and gratifying for me it make it. I really wanted to win. I’d never been to the championship game. And what would it be like to be a part of history?
“I remember Coach Pitino saying: ‘You guys have a chance to do something special, that hasn’t been done since 1978.’ That always played in the back of my mind.’ ”
If it seemed as though the championship game then would become a mere coronation, Pitino certainly understood this to be preposterous. He was friends with Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim. SU’s zone defense was a March nightmare for many opponents, and had spoiled Providence’s surprising run under Pitino to the 1987 Final Four.
The Wildcats wrestled with that until what great teams do at last was done: They found the most logical way to win. Their two best shooters, Delk and Mercer, fired from long distance and punished the Orange, a combined 10-of-16 on threes. Delk was named most outstanding player for scoring a combined 44 points in the two Final Four games.
“I think the chemistry was so good, and camaraderie and how we enjoyed be around each other,” Delk said. “None of us had anything. It’s so funny, with the NIL now, nobody was getting paid then. We were all doing it for the love of the game but also just knowing we had something special, and we didn’t want to mess it up.”
That was another thing that separated this Kentucky team, although not for all the teams in UK history. The 1978 edition of Wildcats led by Goose Givens and Rick Robey experienced something similar, where the possibilities and expectations were so grand that winning, as Pope described it, first meant “massive relief.”
When you enter a season with all the components of championship basketball Kentucky featured in 1995-96 and leave with something other than a title, it is hard to escape that feeling: It should have been us.
“Nothing else was going to even be close to acceptable,” Pope said. “There was an incredible amount of pride in our locker room because of what we had gone through and what we had faced throughout the course of the season – mostly in our practices, and in our locker room, about staying together and loving each other.
“I think there was an incredible amount of joy, because if you come to Kentucky, it takes you about 2 seconds to understand that this means more here than it does anywhere else.
“C.M. Newton was our athletic director, and he came in the locker room well after the game and told us, ‘Guys, this is sweet right now, but it will get sweeter and sweeter every moment for the rest of your life. And that’s so true.”
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